Abstract
Next to the typical motor signs, Parkinson’s disease (PD) goes along with neuropsychiatric symptoms, amongst others affecting social cognition. Particularly, Theory of Mind (ToM) impairments have mostly been associated with right hemispherical brain dysfunction, so that it might prevail in patients with left dominant PD. Fourty-four PD patients, twenty-four with left and twenty with right dominant motor symptoms, engaged in the Reading the Mind in the Eyes (RME) and the Faux Pas Detection Test (FPD) to assess affective and cognitive ToM. The results were correlated with performance in further cognitive tests, and analyzed with respect to associations with the side of motor symptom dominance and severity of motor symptoms. No association of ToM performance with right hemispheric dysfunction was found. RME results were inversely correlated with motor symptom severity, while FPD performance was found to correlate with the performance in verbal fluency tasks and the overall cognitive evaluation. Affective ToM was found associated with motor symptom severity and cognitive ToM predominantly with executive function, but no effect of PD lateralization on this was identified. The results suggest that deficits in social cognition occur as a sequel of the general corticobasal pathology in PD, rather than as a result of hemisphere-specific dysfunction.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
AMDP, Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Methodik und Dokumentation in der Psychiatrie (2007) Das AMDP-System. Manual zur Dokumentation psychiatrischer Befunde. Hogrefe, Göttingen
Baron-Cohen S, Ring HA, Wheelwright S, Bullmore ET, Brammer MJ, Simmons A (1999) Social intelligence in the normal and autistic brain: an fMRI study. Eur J Neurosci 11:1891–1898
Baron-Cohen S, Wheelwright S, Hill J, Raste Y, Plumb I (2003) The “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” test revised version: a study with normal adults, and adults with Asperger syndrome or high-functioning autism. J Child Psychol Psychiatry 42:241–251
Bodden ME et al (2010) Affective and cognitive theory of mind in patients with Parkinson’s disease. Parkinsonism Relat Disord 16:466–470. doi:10.1016/j.parkreldis.2010.04.014
Bora E, Walterfang M, Velakoulis D (2015) Theory of mind in Parkinson’s disease: a meta-analysis. Behav Brain Res 292:515–520. doi:10.1016/j.bbr.2015.07.012
Cools R (2006) Dopaminergic modulation of cognitive function-implications for l-DOPA treatment in Parkinson’s disease. Neurosci Biobehav Rev 30:1–23
Damier P, Hirsch EC, Agid Y, Graybiel AM (1999) The substantia nigra of the human brain. II. Patterns of loss of dopaminergic neurons in Parkinson’s disease. Brain 122:1437–1448
Gallagher HL, Happé F, Brunswick N, Fletcher PC, Frith U, Frith CD (2000) Reading the mind in cartoons and stories: an fMRI study on ‘theory of mind’ in verbal and nonverbal tasks. Neuropsychologia 38:11–21
Gallese V, Eagle MN, Migone P (2007) Intentional attunement: mirror neurons and the neural underpinnings of interpersonal relations. J Am Psychoanal Assoc 55:131–176
Holm S (1979) A simple sequentially rejective multiple test procedure. Scand J Stat 6:65–70
Kalbe E, Schlegel M, Sack AT, Nowak DA, Dafotakis M, Bangard C et al (2010) Dissociating cognitive from affective theory of mind: a TMS study. Cortex 46:769–780
Kraft TL, Pressman SD (2012) Grin and bear it: the influence of manipulated facial expression on the stress response. Psychol Sci 23:1372–1378
Pellicano C, Assogna F, Cravello L, Langella R, Caltagirone C, Spalletta G, Pontieri FE (2015) Neuropsychiatric and cognitive symptoms and body side of onset of parkinsonism in unmedicated Parkinson’s disease patients. Parkinsonism Relat Disord 21:1096–1100
Peron J et al (2009) Are dopaminergic pathways involved in theory of mind? A study in Parkinson’s disease. Neuropsychologia 47:406–414. doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2008.09.008
Poletti M, Enrici I, Bonuccelli U, Adenzato M (2011) Theory of mind in Parkinson’s disease. Behav Brain Res 219:342–350. doi:10.1016/j.bbr.2011.01.010
Poletti M, Frosini D, Pagni C, Baldacci F, Giuntini M, Mazzucchi S, Tognoni G, Lucetti C, Dotto PD, Ceravolo R, Bonuccelli U (2013) The relationship between motor symptom lateralization and cognitive performance in newly diagnosed drug-naïve patients with Parkinson's disease. J Clin Exp Neuropsychol 35(2):124–131
Rickham PP (1964) Human experimentation code of ethics of the world medical association Declaration of Helsinki. BMJ 2:177
Roca M, Torralva T, Gleichgerrercht E, Chade A, Arevalo GG, Gershanik O et al (2010) Impairments in social cognition in early medicated and unmedicated Parkinson’s disease. Cognitive Behav Neurol 23:152–158
Sawamoto N, Piccini P, Hotton G, Pavese N, Thielemans K, Brooks DJ (2008) Cognitive deficits and striato-frontal dopamine release in Parkinson’s disease. Brain 131:1294–1302
Schneider JS, Sendek S, Yang C (2015) Relationship between motor symptoms, cognition, and demographic characteristics in treated mild/moderate Parkinson’s disease. PLoS One 10:e0123231
Shamay-Tsoory SG, Aharon-Peretz J (2007) Dissociable prefrontal networks for cognitive and affective theory of mind: a lesion study. Neuropsychologia 45:3054–3067
Shamay-Tsoory SG, Tibi-Elhanay Y, Aharon-Peretz J (2006) The ventromedial prefrontal cortex is involved in understanding affective but not cognitive theory of mind stories. Soc Neurosci 1:149–166
Sommer M, Dohnel K, Sodian B, Meinhardt J, Thoermer C, Hajak G (2007) Neural correlates of true and false belief reasoning. NeuroImage 35:1378–1384
Stone VE, Baron-Cohen S, Knight RT (1998) Frontal lobe contributions to theory of mind. J Cognitive Neurosci 10:640–656
Tomlinson CL, Stowe R, Patel S, Rick C, Gray R, Clarke CE (2010) Systematic review of levodopa dose equivalency reporting in Parkinson’s disease. Mov Disord 25:2649–2653
Tramacere A, Ferrari PF (2016) Faces in the mirror, from the neuroscience of mimicry to the emergence of mentalizing. J Anthropol Sci 94:113–126
Verreyt N, Nys GM, Santens P, Vingerhoets G (2011) Cognitive differences between patients with left-sided and right-sided Parkinson's disease. A review. Neuropsychol 21:405–424
Vogeley K, Bussfeld P, Newen A, Herrmann S, Happé F, Falkai P et al (2001) Mind reading: neural mechanisms of theory of mind and self-perspective. NeuroImage 14:170–181
Völlm BA, Taylor AN, Richardson P, Corcoran R, Stirling J, McKie S (2006) Neuronal correlates of theory of mind and empathy: a functional magnetic resonance imaging study in a nonverbal task. NeuroImage 29:90–98
Weed E (2008) Theory of mind impairment in right hemisphere damage: a review of the evidence. Int J Speech-Lang Pathol 10:414–424. doi:10.1080/17549500802455429
Wellman HM, Cross D, Watson J (2001) Meta-analysis of theory-of-mind development: the truth about false belief. Child Dev 72:655–684
Winner E, Brownell H, Happé F, Blum A, Pincus D (1998) Distinguishing lies from jokes: theory of mind deficits and discourse interpretation in right hemisphere brain-damaged patients. Brain Lang 62:89–106
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Funding sources
This work was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG, projects Kl 1276/4-2 and Kl 1276/6 in KFO 247).
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Nobis, L., Schindlbeck, K., Ehlen, F. et al. Theory of mind performance in Parkinson’s disease is associated with motor and cognitive functions, but not with symptom lateralization. J Neural Transm 124, 1067–1072 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00702-017-1739-2
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00702-017-1739-2